I love it when people outside libraries see us not as dinosaurs, but share ideas with which I heartily agree.

Today, Kathy Sierra (programmer, game developer and author of my favourite deceased blog, Creating Passionate Users) gave me a glimpse on Twitter:

Reminded again that libraries should be rebranded/repositioned as Centers for Kicking Ass. You leave w/ more ability than you came with.

She elaborated in her next tweet:

Kids want better graphics rez for games, but learning about trees, stars, clouds, bugs… it’s like upgrading the resolution of the WORLD

The thought was keeping already kick-ass librarian Kate Sheehan awake – what should we call ourselves in this case?

I loved Kathy Sierra’s answer:

@itsjustkate there’s always that character in the comic books… the one that mentors and/or supplies the new superheroes.

Judging by their “read” poster, I think this mission is one that the Kalamazoo Public Library has already taken on board, kpl-read-poster-3:

Kick-Ass Superhero Mentors? I think I can live with that vision.

Remember last year’s  Thriller video from the National Library of Australia’s Christmas Party (Michael Jackson Library Video Mashups )? I’ve played it in a couple of presentations this year about libraries using media.  I have asked the audience “what do you think of when you think of the National Library of Australia?” both before and after I play it.

Now I can add Volume Two – this year’s Can Can’t Dancers . It includes all those features that make a library what it is – boys being girls, cartwheels, superman poses on book trolleys, bookthrowing, office chair choreography and even the splits.

Thankfully (?) this appears *not* to be part of a meme, so I can’t link to other videos of similar shennanigans in libraries like I did last year… Enjoy….

I had a couple of comments on my last post, 22 things I am going to do now that the library Kindle has arrived. , that I’m addressing here. I didn’t cover those points in my other post as it was getting too long.

Jim asked “why get the Kindle and not another ebook reader?”.

My main reason is that many ebooks are not available to Australians, but Amazon has advertised that they will have a larger range.

I presumed  the lack of ebook range was to do with Australia’s restrictions on parallel imports, so no other publisher can sell any version of a work if an Australian publisher is already selling a version of it in our market. If the Australian rights holder did not publish an ebook version, then we could not buy one produced elsewhere.  However ebooks are implied not to be covered by parallel importation regulations in the Minister’s press release a fortnight ago announcing that they were not changing the parallel importation provisions,( Regulatory regime for books to remain unchanged).

I found it impossible to find many good, recent fiction ebooks available to Australians when I tried to buy some in July. I tried to buy from several sites Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger as an ebook to read on my iPhone. Although I used Paypal – and at one shop I used store-specific vouchers bought with my Paypal account – I was unable to complete my purchase and download. For all stores I received a message that the credit card was Australian and I was prevented by law from downloading that work. Fellow Australian librarian, Kate Davis, reports that she has only had success with downloading some items for her Sony ebook reader if she uses vouchers that a friend has purchased in the US then sent to her.

I have discovered that many of the most requested items in our libraries are still not available to Australia from Amazon’s Kindle store, but the range is better than what was previously available.

In my ebook session for the public, I aim to point them toward the Mobileread E-book reader matrix that compares all the ebook readers on the market. I want to tell them that the Kindle is not the only alternative, and particularly compare using the Kindle to getting ebooks on the iPhone and straight to the computer.

An  unexpected discovery since I’ve been using the Kindle is how easy it is to add works to it from the Kindle store. I think this would be an advantage for people who were unsure about technology but through disability, for example, wanted some of the features of an ebook reader. To get books onto my iPhone, I download them to my computer, open them in the Stanza computer ap and then transfer them to my iPhone – many steps that require more tech knowledge than needed to buy for the Kindle from Amazon.  For the Kindle I find the title by searching the store, click on it and it is delivered via wireless.  Looking at the E-book reader matrix, it seems that most ebook readers sold in Australia need their contents transferred via computer.

I agree that the Nook looks great – but again it’s not planned to be marketed in Australia any time soon. We are not buying the Kindle because we think it is the best ebook reader possible, but to help our community learn how to connect to content available to them via ebooks – and it’s a tool that is easily available now.

missioncreep, in what is possibly an automated spam promotion for one of the sites mentioned in the comments, suggests several useful sites to get free content.

Again, free content for ebook readers is something I want to promote in my session about ebooks for the public. I only realised a couple of months ago that Kindles allowed content from outside Amazon. My cynicism about Digital Rights Management made me presume that it would only read Amazon’s proprietary .azw formats. This is partly true, as other file formats need conversion via email, but it will read DOC, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and PDF . It will also read non-DRM files in other formats.

I want to let users know about sites like Project Gutenburg, which has been going since 1971 and has audiobooks as well as ebooks.  I want to point them to sites like AddALL ebooks that allow you to search 30 different sites for ebook titles. If I have time, I am going to get hold of as many different versions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that I can find and use that as an example of how the same content can be repackaged in as many places as possible.

Our small public library is in an area where many library users are likely to get for Christmas  some hot newfangled gadget – like a Kindle ebook reader. My aim is for the community to think “library” when they think ebooks. I want to give our community hands-on contact with an ebook reader and advertise the library as a place that knows about reading in all forms and can make recommendations about content.

1.Slip on the clear silicone cover and plastic film screen protectors I ordered at the same time. I browsed over 500 covers on the store to find something that would protect it while making the device look slightly drab and less desirable.

2. Get used to living in the future. Today I paid $3 and download from the Kindle Store the complete works of Shakespeare (197 works).

3. Contain my amusement that 90% of people who have picked it up attempted to select menu items using their fingers as though it was a touch screen.

4. Read Jude O’Connell’s excellent guide to using the International Kindle in Australia, Kindle-ing a discussion about learning . It includes differences between what we get and what is in the US version, sources for ebooks, tech tips on downloading and information about where to find the best “how to” guides.

5. Browse wikipedia on the Kindle, but not anywhere else on the web because it is not allowed on the Australian edition.

6. Use the dinky, non-intuitive text enlargement button to try out the Text-to-Speech option.

7. Look at what other libraries are doing with their Kindles like River Forest Public Library ,NCSU library, Boxford Library .

8. Check out the Facebook group for organizations and libraries lending Kindles where there are many links to ebook programs in libraries.

9. Plan a session for the public about ebook readers at the start of December –  giving them lots of chance to play with the Kindle and learn how to read books on the iPhone or a computer, and where to download free ebooks.

10. Write a press release for local media about the ebook session. Make it clear that although ebooks will change things for libraries, we still have a central role for our communities.

11. Aim to circulate the Kindle for two hour loans inside the library for the first six months or so – but be flexible if there is low or higher demand.

12. Try to work out where to put the barcode when I have covered all surfaces with a silicone cover. Choose between asking staff to flip up the cover a bit at the front or cutting a rectangle in the back to get to the barcode.

13. Work out how to catalogue the Kindle. Some libraries have Kindle as a location and have a separate entry for each work. Others catalogue the Kindle as a work. Steal records from other libraries.

14. Assign a Dewey number of 028 to it when the cataloguing module demands a Dewey.

15. Try to download children’s books from the Kindle store, and discover that there are no Captain Underpants, no Harry Potter, no Emily Rodda. Discover a lot of worthy kiddie ethics books like “Sharing is good for you and me”. Go with “New moon” and “Video Rose and Mark Spark” from Jacqueline Wilson.

16. Try to download adult books from the Kindle store. Discover no “Elegance of the Hedgehog, no “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”, no “Lost Symbol”. Settle for “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, “And another thing…:, the “Scarpetta Factor”, “The complete works of Jane Austen”,  “The complete works of Charles Dickens”.

17. Throw in the 7 book omnibus “Green your home all in one for dummies”.

18. Create a one page user guide showing what the buttons do. Put it and the Kindle in the hands of a staff member who has no idea what it is but is a very good sport and watch what she does. Add to the user guide instructions about how to get back to the start of each book, so that they are not left “open” mid-way.

19. Set up a new loan policy for our system, 2 hour loans, just for the Kindle so that it can be borrowed in the building. Try to work out how to use our LMS so users can reserve it without creating confusion for staff. Fail miserably and, since there is not yet a central place online to share staff information, print out booking sheet to go next to the kindle in our drawer.

20. When I have purchased all the works I want, deregister the library Amazon account from the Kindle . The purchased  content will stay there, but the only way someone can use the library line of credit to buy new works is if they re-register the account.

21. Give staff as much training as they want in the week before we start lending it out (mid-December).

22. Wonder what I have forgotten and what I will have to tweak…

A month ago I visited Darwin to keynote the 6th ALIA Top End Symposium: exploring library spaces for learning and e-learning. I promised to publish my slides and a recording of what I said within the week. Well – I’m zooming through a backlog of professional and household tasks, so here it is.

I wrote the abstract for my talk several months ago, and it looked like this:

What skills do library staff need to evaluate whether innovations spaces are suitable for their users? How can they plan and implement these nimbly? In this keynote, Kathryn Greenhill reviews the physical spaces created in some of the most innovative libraries in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the Netherlands. She examines some of the tools and opportunities for creating new online spaces. She suggests two ingredients that are essential if we are going to create our libraries as effective learning spaces.

When I sat down to write the talk,  I found that I talked a lot more about serendipitous learning, or “guerrilla  learning”  – learning that is beyond a curriculum – and whether this should be a core purpose for libraries. I still managed to slip in heaps of photos of the best libraries I’ve visited in the last couple of years.

Here is the slideset that I used, synchronised with audio of a practice in my bedroom a couple of days before –  Disco balls, waterless urinals and augmented reality: equipping ourselves to create innovative library learning spaces. Slides 118 – 148 are out of sync with the audio. They changed too quickly for slideshare’s slidecast tool to cope with.

If you had one sentence to describe to government and funding bodies what our public libraries do, what would you say?

The document

The Australian Library and Information Association is leading the formulation of a unified vision on Australia’s public libraries. This vision statement will guide a future framework. It will be used in lobbying government to help them understand the importance and mission of libraries. The vision, rationale, priority areas and questions are outlined in Developing a vision and national framework for Australian Public Libraries .

Feedback on the statement is sought until 11 December 2009. Feedback to: Jane Hardy ALIA Assistant Director: Strategy & Advocacy 02 6215 8235 advocacy@alia.org.au.

Priority areas

The areas to bring to government attention are identified as:

• Social inclusion and community engagement
• Children, early learning and a literate Australia
• Encouraging the digital economy and digital citizenship
• Health and aging.

I would add to the list something about recreation, fun and joy. This permeates the four areas, but I would list it separately. Yes, being happy makes one healthier and encourages engagement. Programs like  wii gaming, or Santa in the library, or a sing-along for the elderly can be framed as having high “worthiness”, but they also have a very high fun index.  I think this sometimes needs to be foregrounded in our funding requests – some of our activities are just straight out fun, and this is worthy in itself.

Any lobbying effort about the value of libraries should be coupled with sensible indicators of Return On Investment. I don’t mean stats about numbers of issues or number of legs that come through our doors or number of programs. Too often we give these easy to count numbers to our funding bodies as though they relayed our entire value. I think it is essential that we articulate what our aims are in the four identified areas and how we will measure them. I don’t mean research into what we are doing now (as mentioned in the document), but where we aim to be and how we will know when we get there.

The vision statement

All elements of the vision statement are well justified in the document, and I can see why all elements are included. The point is made in the document that “It is a lengthy statement. Is there an opportunity to shorten it?”. Yes, I think it should be shorter. Too many words, too much like any other government document, too easily ignored and not understood at first reading. Here is the statement

Australia’s public libraries, united behind common goals and ambitions, sharing best practice, contributing to strong communities, valued by people and government, continuing to provide universal free access to information, knowledge and ideas, and confirming the importance of their role for future generations.

Cutting a few words for brevity, rather than precision, can bring it down to:

Australia’s public libraries united by common goals and valued by citizens and government as they continue to strengthen communities by providing free and professional access to information, knowledge and ideas.

Trying to get shorter and punchier, although not so comprehensive, comes down to the vision below. It  focuses on clarifying what we do. How we do it and who cares is not added in the vision, and I am not sure it needs to be:

Australia’s public libraries united as we strengthen our communities through free access to information, knowledge and ideas.

What do you think? Too bland?

The SIRSI/Dynix marketing document,  Integrated Library Systems Platforms on Open Source, has generated much critique in the last few days. To catch up with it, there are a number of places to go.

I have added my own point by point comments on the google doc embedded at the end of this post.

Stephen Abram’s blog

There has been vigourous debate in the comments on Stephen Abram’s blog post – often disjointed due to the fact that comments appear only after Stephen has checked them and added his 2c worth. I understand that he has a spam problem, but it makes it very hard to keep a fluid, open and timely dialogue. Several  SIRSI/Dynix customers have weighed in. They present a rather different picture of the product to that depicted in the position paper.

Joint Google Doc annotation

Jason Griffey – while stuck in an airport on the way back from a conference – set up a google document for anyone who wanted to add annotations.  He has blogged about this: Sirsi-Dynix vs Open Source Software .

The google doc is here, SIRSI Dynix Position Paper on Open Source annoted by other libraryfolk and embedded at the end of this post.  I contributed to this. Editors included:  Jason Griffey Nicole Engard, Chris Cormack, Toby Greenwalt, Kathryn Greenhill, Karen Schneider, Melissa Houlroyd, Tara Robertson, Dweaver, Lori Ayre, Heather Braum, Laura Crossett, Josh Neff, and a few others who have usernames that Jason could not can’t decipher.

Scroll down half way to see the start of the commentary, colour coded and initialled so you can see who said what. The start of the document is a collation of the points made below.

Etherpad

Tim Spalding set up a  Etherpad document , limited to 16 editors, where a different set of people have been adding their notes.

Code4Lib wiki pages

There is a page on the Code4Lib wiki pointing to all the commentaries on the document . Another page on the same wiki has a dump of the Etherpad as on 1 Novemember .

(I started creating a dump of the doc on the Code4 Lib site, with a view to merging it with the etherpad, but time overtook me…If anyone has time to do this – and maybe add in the material from Stephen’s blog , I think a very interesting and comprehensive picture would emerge).

Outside Libraryland

The story has also been picked up outside of libraryland, notably by ItWire Open Source FUD is alive and kicking and Linux Weekly News Hudson: Corporate lobbying against free software .

Here is the SIRSI Dynix Position Paper on Open Source annoted by other libraryfolk Google Doc embedded:

FUD

Here is a link to a document by Stephen Abram about Integrated Library Systems Platforms on Open Source .  It was originally circulated by hand to a few his company’s own customers and leaked via the wikileaks site. Stephen has since released it on his blog, along with his explanation and a request for respectful discussion.

To me, it looks like the document essentially a marketing document about the virtues of the vendor for which Stephen works. I don’t think it aims to be a balanced discussion on the pros and cons of Open Source software in libraries. I’m disappointed that some claims made are unsubstantiated and that some of the unsubstantiated claims are about rival products. I do not think the tone of the article was the best choice.

I do not think that many of Stephen’s claims are backed by formal literature,  nor that the claims about why libraries develop Open Source are accurate. I spent the last few weeks extensively researching the literature and analysing my own survey and interview data with six libraries that originally developed major Open Source library software – Koha, Evergreen, VUFind, Blacklight, Scriblio and SOPAC2 . I submitted the resulting paper for peer review on Monday, but since I was sponsored by the good folk at VALA to write the paper for the VALA 2010 conference on February 9-11 2010, I can’t say anything about *what* I found out until then.

A reason to be cheerful

I’m feeling a bit down about the FUD around Stephen’s paper – but I cheer up when I think about what is happening in Canberra this weekend. Some of the cleverest and most civic-minded Australian programmers  have descended on the nation’s capital for a one and a half day “hackfest” using Australian government web based datasets and services.  Govhack participants will then have 90 seconds to pitch their product to the judges at the end of the day. Products are beginning to trickle out, like these preliminary visualisations of government agencies that perform arts, indigenous and health functions from Rob Manson. This event is being run in conjunction with the MashupAustralia competition that runs until 13 November.

What do I want to see in my world? More Open Data and community effort, less FUD.

Library futurist troubadours, David Lee King and Michael Porter have launched their new video. Library 101 . It’s a bright and breezy call for libraries to keep what is at our core and learn new basics if they are going to survive in the future. The video features the faces of over 500 librarians throughout the world.

The was aim is not just to wear disco pants and entertain – although I’m grateful that they did that – but to get people talking and thinking about what to keep and what to change. The Library 101 site , also launched this morning has a section of Resources and Things to Know plus a collection of 24 essays around the theme. David and Michael “asked some widely known and respected folks in Libraryland to talk about what they see changing in libraries and what we need to be doing to ensure we remain relevant as technology and society evolve”.

For my contribution I made a 2 minute mini-movie and a little essay about the basics of what it means to get “deeply local” – community, content, local linking, linking to the world and knowing possibilities. Here it is, Deeply local at your library 101 .

DEEPLY LOCAL AT YOUR LIBRARY 101

The key for libraries to thrive in the new digital landscape is to get deeply local.

Libraries have a competitive strength over Google or Amazon or off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all databases.

We can use human skills to know intimately our communities and their information needs. We can know what type of information they want, how they prefer to get it and ask them questions.

We can provide platforms for creating local content and match existing content to the needs of our communities.

Rather than declining in a world of born-digital user-created content , libraries have a chance to occupy a central place in our communities.

We do need to change the way we do things.

The deeply local has five key components:
1. Community – Knowing intimately our communities and their informational, recreational needs. This could involve chatting regularly to our users, conducting non-user surveys or analysing the hits on our website.

2) Content – Knowing the content available for our local community and by our community. This includes local history collections in local libraries and institutional repositories in academic libraries.

3) Local linking – Linking our community with each other via local content, or content that meets their informational needs. Encouraging study groups in our buildings or hosting a social network for a local bookclub is an example of this.

4) Linking to the world – Linking the world to local content. Linking our users to the local information hosted elsewhere. Essential in this is providing free and open access to material produced with public money and understanding about the best ways to get data in an out of our systems for remixing.

5) Knowing possibilities – Knowing what is available and possible with information and content – and bringing that back to our communities and matching it to their needs. Getting deeply local is not about doing exactly what our users want – we can do better than that. It is about library staff knowing about how to connect people and information so well that we exceed our users expectations.